


Slippery Slope

by dorothy_notgale



Series: The More Loving One (Beyond Beyond Re-Animator) [6]
Category: Bride of Re-Animator (1989), Re-Animator (1985)
Genre: Dan POV, Fear of Death, Internalized Homophobia, Lying to yourself, M/M, Manipulation, Poor Life Choices, Post-Massacre, Pre-Peru, Slurs, Withdrawal, petting, poor communication kills, sexual favors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-04
Updated: 2015-12-04
Packaged: 2018-05-04 22:07:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5350202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothy_notgale/pseuds/dorothy_notgale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan's first priority, after the funerals and the lying and the cover-up, is to dry out his friend. Herbert will be better off once he's off the ReAgent; they both will.<br/>Dan'll help him to Just Say No, because Dan's good at that.<br/>Herbert has other ideas. Dan's lonely.<br/>They'll be <em>fine.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Slippery Slope

**Author's Note:**

> _In which Dan Cain learns why Magical Healing Cock is not considered a legit addiction cure. Technically Mittens!Verse, but can be read as a standalone._

“This—this was a bad idea, Dan,” Herbert stutters, lists to one side while pacing his tiny bedroom like a caged tiger on speed. By now, _Dan's_ head is pounding with exhaustion. “I think we should stop.”

“That's what we're doing. _Stopping_.”

“Shut up.” Herbert's shaking, naked to the waist and only barely wearing the bottom half of a pair of scrubs low on bony hips. The withdrawal’s made his skin flu-ishly oversensitive to light touches, and anyway, he sweated through his clothes days ago. Excreted ReAgent imparts a sickly shimmer as a side effect of his overtaxed systems purging themselves.

It's been a bad spell, especially since Dan can't exactly ask for help with drying out a student addicted to something nobody else on the planet's ever seen before; he's muddling through on a combination of half-applicable classes and common sense, trying to keep a lid on the dehydration and make sure his friend's constantly-racing heart doesn't… explode, or something. _(He tells himself that's hyperbole.)_

And then there's the mood swings. ‘Volatile’ doesn't begin to describe them.

“You _stupid_ son of a bitch!” (Dan's never heard anyone say 'motherfucker' with a fraction of the venom Herbert can pack into a grade-schooler's attack on a person's intellect.) “You're killing me! I can feel it!” If he digs his fingers into his temples any harder, he's going to draw blood; Dan is able to pull them away with some effort, which leaves him stuck to a pinioned and hissing threat.

“My brain's going, Dan,” Herbert pants. His breath doesn't indicate ketosis, despite the fact that he hasn’t kept a single bite down in who knows how long. “It's going dark. I can't think.”

“You don't have to think right now,” Dan tries, he _tries_ to project calm, but he's scared and tired and frustrated. “After you're clean—”

“Don't you dare condescend to me, you small-minded—”

“Herbert, come on.”

This time Herbert gets him off-guard, wriggling a fist free and flailing at Dan's face. It's child's play to catch it and wrestle him to the bed.

Although this does put Dan's throat uncomfortably near bared teeth. Why can't Herbert show a little thankfulness, just a sliver? Why can't he make this _one thing_ easy?

“Stop it. I'm not gonna stay here and let you attack me.” It's a lie, he knows—where would he go? Work? School? The cemetery, to stare down at a grave so fresh the headstone hasn't even been delivered? For better or worse _(worse)_ , this is where Dan belongs now.

But something in that empty threat triggers yet another shift in the storm beneath him; Herbert, so strong and brittle, cracks. Phosphorescence glints in his eyelashes, and his lips move in a nearly sub-vocal chant that Dan has to lean dangerously close to hear:

“Please don't go, Dan. Please. I need you.”

Acknowledgement. Vulnerability. A break; Jesus, it’s been too long. Finally the fight's gone out, leaving behind the wreckage of Dan's brilliant, flawed friend in need of a helping hand.

Dan _owes_ him a helping hand. He should have held on harder the first time, but his fingers and will were too weak to assist then. This request means he’s got the chance to atone with skills he actually possesses: _healing_ talents, not violence. He can hold on against this dark, and Herbert can reach back. Thank _God_.

He curves unconsciously up and over the little body radiating blast-furnace heat, cradling and cradled at once.

“Please, Danny.”

It's wrong, in every sense, to be gratified by the sight _(feel)_ of a man as powerful as this laid low by his own weaknesses and begging to borrow Dan's strength. Clinging, even, wiry frame's twitchy movement as imploring as the words. Isolation, self-sufficiency: not enough at the end of the line. The rolling throb of gallingly physical pleasure Dan feels appalls him even as his hips pin his partner, his _patient_ , to a beaten-flat bed.

Herbert's out of his head, he tells himself, and uninterested in sex at the best of times. It'll be alright.

“Please stay. I—I'll do—please, I'm going to die if you leave.”

Dan sighs, breath uneven, and lets go of unresisting arms rainbowed by days of overlapping bruises. The rapid pulse is worrying, but not dangerous. More troubling is this new fear. Impending doom. _Thanatophobia_.

Most troubling yet is the way Herbert pulls him down to rest, forehead-to-forehead, in a moment of startlingly harmless intimacy. The brow pressed against Dan's remains furrowed in pain, lips thinned with it, and the person emerging from the ordeal whispers his name like a prayer.

“Daniel.”

“Herbert?”

“I want you, Dan.”

Dan could still be misinterpreting this, even with the leg curling around him, the hands slithering to the small of his back, until Herbert aims an inept peck for his mouth and mostly misses.

“Please. I need you to make me feel alive.” Herbert's not hard—unsurprising, considering his physical condition—but there's such unabashed longing in his face. Maybe this is it: something Dan actually knows how to do. Maybe he can give his friend something to heal for. Not a pity fuck, but a way to fill the void in that incredible, vast mind. It’s no hardship.

It's practically charitable, he thinks as he gives in.

Herbert's kisses are unskilled, his movements made clumsy by the shakes, and he feels so good. Feverishly hot and eager, shivering with every soft brush against his bare nerve-raw skin. He grows over Dan like a vine on a tomb, creeper or strangling bittersweet, and through it all, that litany continues.

“Please. Please.” Innocent, guilty hands on Dan's throat, his arms, anywhere and everywhere, less erotic than purely tactile. “I don't want to die.”

_Don’t let me go back into the dark._

“I know. We'll get through this.” Dan trails his fingers along a hairline plastered with perspiration and continues onward. He strums strung-bead bumps of bone all the way down to the base of the spine inside worn cotton, the narrow back's trembling gentled by his exploratory touch. How could anyone this alive fear the immediacy of death? Then again, how could anyone expect Herbert not to fear something that foreign to his nature? “Shh, baby. I've got you.”

They move gingerly, Herbert so frail in Dan's grasp. He looks like everything depraved, but something underneath shines as he allows himself to be gathered into Dan's lap and fondled. He begs so nicely, wriggles and squeaks when his nipples are teased. His chest and cheeks flush to the point where he almost appears well.

Meg, barely cold, would understand. Their lazy, aimless sway, this bruised tenderness… it isn't her but it's right, and she can't begrudge it. Dan has to believe that she'd seen what he sees in Herbert before she died; she'd seen his light when he sacrificed himself for life, Work, and them. Dan was the one who failed to make good on that gift.

A strange, electric flavor saturates the skin he licks, shocking his tongue and leaving a vague chemical numbness behind. Not To Be Taken Orally, but he's gone too far now. It's addictive, after all. He wonders what color the semen would be.

Sweet and bright as antifreeze.

Herbert's legs are too unsteady to properly dry-hump Dan, but it doesn't matter—this alone, this easy redemption, is all Dan wants from his friend. He can do all the work, and does for half an hour or more. They edge along the baselines, barely even approaching second, until Herbert breaks an overwet kiss to speak, glassy-eyed.

“We're doing this the wrong way.” Poor thing, sick and insecure. Dan reassures him like he's Karen Thomas from Junior Prom:

“No, no, honey, you're doing fine; we don't have to—”

“Gradually reducing the dosage will be safer.” It takes a moment for the words to make sense, and when they do it all turns to offal. Mother _fucker_ , he _is_ stupid. He stands up, heedlessly dumping his lapful to the floor, and presses a hand over his mouth in hopes of controlling the revulsion twisting his gut.

He'd fallen for a junkie's whoring. Even now, that reptilian, calculated caress wending its way up his calf inflames him further, but the burn's gone ugly and sullen, as rotten as everything else.

“Danny, what's wrong?” Affectionate. Yielding. Cloying and false.

“Don't—don't touch me.” He forces himself to recoil so he won't do what he wants to: give this man-shaped creature what it's asking for, in all ways.

“Dan—” It crawls forward.

“I can't look at you right now.” He flees, grasping the doorknob and holding it shut by main force as a series of furious yanks rattle the frame. Raw-throated screaming has Dan down as arrogant, unqualified, unlicensed, controlling; he's supposedly reckless and overbearing and cruel. The pot dredges up a thesaurus of synonyms for 'black' and hurls them full-force at the kettle. Grunting, Dan strains, his body and Herbert's linked on opposite sides of the door in a back-and forth struggle whose movements are at first rhythmic, then chaotic, then defeated.

It lasts both an eternity and a worryingly short time.

When Dan ventures back in, the broken-bird crumple of Herbert's spent form sends a shot of adrenaline pumping through his veins. Blood oozes sluggishly from busted knuckles, tainted with a hint of otherworldly glow. Only the rise and fall of his breast and the flicker of his eyelashes assure Dan the prophecies of doom were wrong.

He could leave. He should leave, abandon Herbert and his will-o'-the-wisps to shoot up and wreck lives and entrance idiots and die in ignominious obscurity. He would leave, but for two things: the patient and the Work.

Because at the end of the day, Herbert _is_ ill, and Herbert _is_ right, and Herbert _can_ save them all as long as he pulls through. Anything else Dan feels… will have to be dealt with in the fullness of time.

With difficult patients, detachment is key.

He kneels, prepared to lift the too-thin drug-seeking bastard long enough to get him off the floor. _Christ, he’s light_. Almost as light as Meg had been, there at the end, the primary difference being that this time Dan can still feel the indefinable, unmistakable hum of life within.

They’re halfway to the bed when hazel eyes snap open, unblocked by lenses--God knows where the glasses went in all of that raving. They fix Dan with a muzzy stare that, for all its lack of focus, still has the power to freeze him. Cracked lips press, roll, purse, and the words Herbert speaks next carry with them a calculation that makes it all oddly sincere:

“I'm sorry.”

 _Sorry._ Presumably for the results, not for the attempt, but--’sorry’ is something Dan can work with, an indication that Herbert knows he violated a boundary, did something intolerable, and got hit with a consequence.

“Sorry enough to do this my way?” Dan asks, setting his burden down without either roughness or ceremony. Procedural. Neutral. Firm; that’s important.

“Yes.” He looks mulish, even while reaching for the hours-old glass of water on the nightstand. After a sip his voice is a little clearer. “Just don't leave again. I don't want to die alone.”

 _Melodrama._ Dan palms his own face in exasperation.

“Herbert, you're not going to—”

“ _Promise me_ that if I die, you won't leave me that way.” And the intensity of that request (he’s always so intense, burning with vitality), the apparent seriousness, reminds Dan of what this man looks like when that’s all snuffed out. He swallows, grabs the water glass and takes a brackish gulp himself before answering the only way he can.

“I promise I'll resuscitate you. Again.” They both know it's not what he's asking for, but Herbert's bloodshot gaze drops to Dan's mouth, heavy and nearly tangible, and he nods.

“I suppose that will have to do.”

Dan hopes so; grandstanding aside, he's not sure what would really happen if push came to shove. He's not sure what would be worse. _(Severing the subject's head prior to Re-Animation had seemed to preserve and even enhance the higher functions.)_

He stays through the night, sitting on the floor with back braced against the bedframe. Herbert contorts into a fetal ball at the edge of the mattress, dying luminescence soaking through Dan's tee shirt and staining his shoulders. When they're finished, the clothing will have to be burned along with the bedding. No evidence of what they've done can remain.

  


~*~*~*~*~

  


Months later, in suffocating jungle heat, a healthier, harder Herbert again offers himself (or rather, his body) to Dan, eyes guarded and face guileless like it's the first time this has come up.

It's been a long time coming. The sickness Dan contracted, the desire for something that isn't there, seeped in and colored everything—every casual touch, every offhand comment—with an illusory but seductive mutuality. He’s been slipping for months, privately relishing each taste, however bad it is for _(of)_ him. The dark is too close here, and he’s not sure who is holding on to whom at this point, nor which way they’re headed at what speed. The presence of a gun says ‘down’; his fascination with the pale, cool fingers _(not hot, not anymore)_ playing over its barrel says ‘fast’.

And with that slip, he exposed his own weakness. Cold, lying hands make his skin burn like he’s the one fevered.

He should say no again; it's still the absolute definition of wrong. But if Herbert insists on selling his virginity so cheaply, who is Dan to gainsay it?

Because the thing is, Dan's been cheapened, too. He'll take what he can get now that the dazzling lights have gone out.

He takes it quickly, for both their sakes.

 


End file.
